It already has some places... Some of my WM's have dramatically cut peg space for the basic figures. Shelf space was cut even worse, so I'm sure it'll dwindle as the movie high dies a slow death.

It's going good though yet, impressive.

It's amazing what good quality toys, and a good film, can do for a toy line. Compared to 99 and 02, it's easy to see just how big of a "bust" those lines were ultimately, what with buy-backs, re-distribution, Sales Expectations unmet, etc.

I think what will be interesting is how hard will it be to get distro out on the final 12? I think some parts of the country will do ok (where demand is high, but so is the competition to get them) and the others who have struggled this year will continue to do so unfortunetly. Here's hoping I am wrong and we all find everything we want.

Logged

"For too long gentleness has been equated with weakness. Yet it takes more strength to be gentle than to be mean."

Toy aisles in general retail stores have always been a fickle beast with less emphasis placed on what actually sells and more emphasis placed on the "hot" toy of the moment. Star Wars, by and large, sells as good, if not better, than any other action figure line in the AF aisle, yet it consistently gets the short shift unless there is a movie in the theaters.

With Star Wars (at least in the retailers I've been in over the past 10 years), toy departments seem to not like the fact that they have to stock them at all. They are consistently the worst stocked action figure line in terms of assortment and stock status in general, the sections are, mostly at WM, in a constant disarray, and I've seen more than one toy department manager roll their eyes when SW is even mentioned. My local WM has a Grievous Bodyguard that was completely ripped off the card and they still have the card itself (no bubble) hanging on the pegs with the bubble laying on the shelf below, with a fresh WM price tag of 5.88 attached to it.

Star Wars was, by all reports, supposed to have had the "feature aisle" at WM to itself until the beginning of August, but by the beginning of June in most places, it had already lost half its space to the Fantastic Flop and the 50 different Batman figures. Neither of those lines sold well AT ALL around me (the fact that there was no Dr. Doom in the FF line until well after the movie was released still makes me scratch my head) but they continue to have more shelf space at WM than SW, which sells rather briskly unless it's a Neimoidian or Clone Pilot.

As for the Final 12, if I ever see them on pegs around me, I'll be shocked. I have yet to see a Shocktrooper or a Green Clone Commander on pegs (the only reason I have one of each is thanks to you, Slothus), and anything past 44 has been something of a chore for me to find. A case assortment where the new figures are all packed 1 per case in the final run of figures is not going to be fun and I have a feeling I'm going to be doing a lot of begging on here and hope that someone will take pity on me.

I'm going to be the eternal pessimist and say that by the time the 2006 Saga Collection is hitting en masse (relatively speaking) in January, WM will have SW back to its usual 6 pegs of figures and a shelf full of lightsabers, while there will still be 20,000 Thing feet taking up space.

Well I'm forever the optimist so I am going to say that I think things will be better this time around with the later ROTS waves than what we saw with TPM and AOTC.

Those first two movies just weren't nearly as popular and neither were the toys... ROTS was such a more hardcore movie and had so much more going on with it, and I continue to see figures move much quicker now than I did then.

For Star Wars sections, the Targets around me all seemed to shrink their section by 1/2, but steadily it has grown and expanded actually. It's really nice to see. The actual shelf space hasn't grown, but they have altered their peg arrangements to accomodate more figures (like when they are low on deluxe figures, they make room for more basic figures and vice versa).

For Walmart, some of the stores have limited to 6-8 pegs for basic figures, but some others have not in my area. One even has an end cap that has at least a 100 pegs on it, and then a basic section that has about 20 pegs.

The one closest to me has about 20 pegs as well, and is restocking like crazy. I go by there every 2-3 days and the section is either low, or freshly restocked.

We also have the DVD coming out in November, so I would expect retailers to want to have a nice selection of figures to compliment the DVD.

I think that also the new SAGA collection will be immensly popular and when it hits, I expect to see more production and availability out of this line (at least initially) than we saw with the OTC.

Well, we've been there and done that before, haven't we? The modern SW line has been around for 10 years now, and I think we've seen it all before. Sure other lines always get in the way, but the other lines tend to come and go, especially the movie related ones.

I think, as always, there's going to be some worry. After all, after 10 years, retail still has little clue to the fact that second to Hot Wheels guys, we are there every day looking specifically for new product and would continue to make purchases so long as they have new product on the shelf. But instead, once product starts to sit, it stays there proventing product that will move to come in and sell. Until new prodcut starts to just sit when it first arrives, the line will continue, it's just a matter of cutting through all the fat and red tape to make sure we don't miss anything.

I'll will hate to admit that without the scalpers all SW lines would be in danger. If they were eliminated that's a huge chunk of buyers gone-would definately have an effect on sales

Do you really think? Wouldn't the product that was left behind by the scalper be bought buy someone who would a) normally buy from a scalper but can now buy it for retail or b) never get the item in the first place because they don't buy from scalpers period?

I wonder sometimes about what percentage of people buy from scalpers because they are any of the following:

-Rich and don't care-Too lazy or simply unable to shop themselves with regularity-Too gulable and impatient to wait.

If most of the people who buy from scaplpers are rich, then yes, the lack of scalping would make a major dent, but I tend to think scalpers sell mainly to the other two catagories who might be more inclined to get out to a store and buy the product up. But, that's pure speculation on my part and perhaps food for thought.

I do believe that scalpers are one of the main reason for items increasing in rareness and even help to increase demand- the way they get folks to fork out cash to get excl..ect really jumps the "market value" of our collectibles thus ensuring the overall line popularity